It seems to me that the time to go overseas is when you are either young, and unencumbered by legions of bastard children, or old and able to get off of work while your bastard children toil in adult-type ways. This labels me as a family man – which I’m quite happily not yet – but in reality is just my way of justifying the eminently unjustifiable. I resolved to go abroad before I go for a broad. I just didn’t know where to… though a series of destinations quickly came to the fore.
I first thought of Japan, to be accomplished in the role of an assistant language teacher for their famous JET program. Why not me, a language teacher, thought I as I posted my overly complicated application, replete with great letters of reference and a stylishly written statement of intent. As it turns out perhaps ‘why me’ would have been a better question, as the JET setters seemed to have scant interest in employing an actual teacher; I wish them joy of their philosophy graduates, incidentally. At any rate I was back to square one, with the added disadvantage in terms of morale of living in a disused family house in the wilds of the Comox valley. This is the fabled ‘no country for young men’, where the number of tracksuits to be seen was only to be surpassed by the number of ill-trained small dogs. Clearly I had to think of a new plan and fast, before I was irrevocably drawn in to the land of rain, latent racism, and geriatric socialites. It wasn’t long before I had come up with a destination to work out my wanderlust upon, coming in the form of a set of islands not dissimilar to those I was to leave.
New Zealand. Sheep, cricket, healthy distaste for Australia, and an obsessive preoccupation with rugby. The perfect blend of distance and familiarity for a lanky coastal boy with latent anglophile leanings; English-language tourism with the distinct omnipresent chance of being inundated by volcanic flow. Why not, then? Onto the plane I went, replete with my craftily-acquired extra legroom and a doubly hospitable tall gin and tonic. Surely comfort in transit was to be mine, I optimistically thought.
Would that it were: New Zealand, you see, is rather far away. It doesn’t really matter your point of origin: you will end up wishing you weren’t in your seat anymore. When I discovered that plugging in my headphones would summarily short out the high technology involved in my video screen, I’ll admit to breathing a sigh of enervated disbelief. It struck me at the time as being a rather useful feature of the audio/visual experience (that audio half) which it seemed, alas, was not to be mine this day. However, one must always be ready to make their own fun.
Look to your left, perhaps, and notice the vaguely Asian woman as she crosses herself thrice during a fit of take-off agitation. Note that her screen works just fine and that she is soon off to sleep with the help of the Justin Bieber movie, which gives you a genuinely new experience: jealously relating to being able to hear, and thus fully experience, Justin Bieber. Well, you weren’t about to get drawn into that adolescent love-fest anyway, were you? Cast eyes to the right, then, to an equally asleep Englishman, whose arms seem to spasm like an electroshock therapy patient’s from time to time; disappointment follows when after devising and carrying out a semi-extensive graphing project you discover that there is actually no discernable pattern to his individual turbulence. At least, you ruefully declare, that half an hour felt vaguely scientific.
I check back in, in the first-person sense, after some 4 hours and one cold dinner of indeterminate pasta… salad, I suppose it rightly should be called. The Justin Bieber movie was of course fine, albeit with (perhaps because of?) the lack of audio: his dancing and/or drumming skills certainly impress after 22 hours of gritty wakefulness. The other more dialogue or plot-ridden movies seem an impossibility, and are abandoned for podcasts and staring off into space. In essence I am a deaf person in a world of white noise and inadvertent/unpredictable left elbows to the short ribs. I was left with either re-reading the in-flight magazine’s article on Hawaiian cowboys and their professional roots (Mexicans, as it turns out), or pondering inventive ways to self-immolate without leaving my seat over the next six hours. The latter seemed the more inviting possibility for the next 400 minutes or so.
I managed to survive this flight despite my own best seat-bound efforts. Perhaps my biggest problem, when it comes time for a 39-hour travelling day, as indeed it was, is a remarkable inability to sleep on a long plane ride. The excitement of it all subverts even sleeping pills of dubious provenance, though they lend a surreal tinge to the cutaways of the Bieb’s silently shrieking/face-clawing fans, and keep me pondering an armrest-mate’s nervous private hayride into the wee hours. Eventually, and a touch impossibly-seeming during hours 6 and 7 of the admittedly long-range flight from Los Angeles (which, we must remember, replaces a multi-month passage in a ship), I arrived in Fiji, just before 5AM local time and two days after I had departed.
My limited experience with Fiji leads me to believe that it must be a very hot place: disembarking at 4:45AM into what I imagine the inside of a black cat’s lungs run temperature-wise on an average Canadian summer day will give one that impression. Additionally, English must be a widely-spoken language, I deduced from the erstwhile-grim paramilitary airport guard’s huge gap-toothed smile upon seeing my bewilderment and noiselessly mouthed mild obscenity. Beyond that, and the bleary observation that the quartet of guitarists who cheerily played us through the customs lines must have oddly skewed internal clocks, all I can truly remember is that “BULA!” must mean welcome, and that vacationing Australians are, by and large, large.
The Aussies must simply adore the USA, at least on some subconscious level. In so many ways they are the US to New Zealand’s Canada, but perhaps most so in terms of tourist size. I saw khaki shorts straining to contain steak-fed legs that usually, though not always, suggested athletic prowess of days gone by. If their prosperous obese differ in terms of route to their size 48 Dockers, however, they made up for it with an affinity for distinctly ‘American’ names: Montana’s taking of Carolina’s doll was a vociferous issue, and Dallas, bless him, seemed entirely uninterested in things other than smashing his rolling suitcase into younger Tallahassee’s. It’s possible that one of those names wasn’t actually overheard (sleep being in short supply), but a definite theme was omnipresent – along with a healthy decibel base. At any rate, let’s leave the Australian character assassination for another time: I wasn’t a scant 3 hours away from visiting their country, after all.
The Kiwis don’t seem much different at first glance. Their traveling representatives match the Aussies in brood size if not in waistband, and share an affinity for starting families at a younger age. Those I saw seemed to favour Socratic reasoning with their children rather than a more direct/smack-y approach, and to speak at a distinctly lower volume than their feistier neighbours. Noting this decibel deficit duly into my burgeoning accent interpretation program my brain was slowly developing, I boarded my final flight of the day in a strange fugue state. After 30+ hours of consecutive soul-sapping travel, I was finally ready to visit Aotearoa, the ‘land of the long white cloud’.
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